Embattled by an avalanche of controversies within the wake of the theft of crown jewels final October, the director of the Musée du Louvre, Laurence des Vehicles, resigned on Tuesday (24 February).
Des Vehicles offered her resignation to French president Emmanuel Macron, who praised “an act of accountability, at a time when the best museum on the planet wants stability and a robust new dedication to undertake the work for its safety, its modernisation” and the controversial plan known as the “Louvre New Renaissance”. A spokesperson for the Presidential Palace mentioned that her successor will likely be appointed on Wednesday (25 February).
Des Vehicles has now been requested to guide a mission for the cooperation between museums of the G7 member nations, below French chairmanship this yr.
In the future after the 19 October heist, Des Vehicles had proposed her resignation to the French tradition minister, Rachida Dati, who declined to simply accept it. Since then, scandals have been piling up and he or she has been struggling to maintain her publish, dealing with mounting calls in Parliament for her departure.
A collection of official studies underlined the “appreciable delays” within the upkeep of the infrastructure, “in favour of an event-driven coverage”. Since her arrival, in Might 2021, lower than 3% of the museum’s funds has been spent on security plans, towards theft, hearth or floods. As an alternative, with president Macron’s assist, she launched an formidable plan for a brand new entrance and a subterranean gallery constructed round its star attraction, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, at an estimated value of €666m.
The unions representing employees on the Louvre demanded the “Louvre New Renaissance” mission to be dropped, and advocated as a substitute for spending to give attention to badly wanted fundamental technical works that would add as much as €500m. In mid-December, employees launched a collection of rolling strikes, the longest within the museum’s historical past.
Incidents of varied types and sizes—from important to catastrophic—haven’t stopped because the heist in October: leaks within the galleries and a library; rooms closed due to cracking beams and a ten-year lengthy ticket fraud. Final Thursday, members of the French parliament who’re a part of an investigation committee trying into points on the museum denounced a “hyper presidency which has amassed failures”. The chair of the committee, Alexandre Portier, added that in “another nation or institution, this record of failures would have since lengthy led to the departure of the director”.
